I imagine this is more elementary than any other queries on this site. I want to use once more various old Fortran77 programs that I have not been able to use for many years since the university abolished its mainframe. I have no experience, therefore in PC compilers and I can't seem to get beyond the first step.

This is a description of how far I have got to and any advice would be highly appreciated.

Installation from the downloaded ZIP file is reported to be complete and the components are all in the recommended WIN32app
folder on the C drive.

However I cannot get any of them to do anything.
When I try to open it, ftn77 flashes briefly and disappears.So does mk77.
RUN77 reports ' no run file specified' Fair enough, but there seems to be no facilty for specifying one. Likewise DBG77.
slink and makeda77 require inputs but I cannot find instructions about which inputs.
In Demo/Fortran, MKFORT runs quickly through a program and disappears in about one second.
stats1 reports a run-time error. stats just flashes briefly, so does hello.

I did, however, manage to play 'chess'.

The problem(s) must be related to various missing elements and links. The User's Guide (p 16) refers to a batch file FTN77VAR.BAT in the FTN77 directory.
There is no FTN77 directory.
There is no .bat file called FTN77VAR.BAT or anything else.

Elsewhere, item 6 'Environmental Variables' tells me about the setting of environmental
variables FTN77LIBDIR which contains the location of FTN77DLL.LIB and TMPDIR.
I cannot see either of these and have tried creating them without result.
Our IT officer here could make no progress either as she has no experience of Fortran.

I have exactly the same problems on my PC and laptop at home.

I am obviously omitting to so something very basic and I am sorry to trouble this site with what
is probably a very elementary error.

FTN77 is designed to run from a command line in a DOS (Command prompt) window.
Most users prefer to use an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Plato2 or Plato3.

The simplest approach is probably to download FTN95 (which can be used for Fortran 77 programs) and to use Plato3 as your IDE. Plato3 is an editor from which you can compile and run your Fortran programs.